Enrico Bayon

Henry Peter George Bayon (originally Enrico Pietro Bayon) (born Genoa 1876, died Little Shelford 20 October 1952) was an Italian British physician and researcher notable for his role in the study of carcinogens and for his work on the history of science.

Early life Bayon's father was in the Swiss consular service in Genoa. His father's family had fled from Paris during the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Bayon's mother, Florence Farington, came from an English Quaker family in the publishing trade. He was educated in Genoa and then at a co-educational school of the Society of Friends in Sidcup. This meant that he grew up he was bilingual in Italian and English from childhood.

Education and early career Bayon went to the University of Genoa to study engineering, after the completion of this course he decided to study medicine and moved to the University of Würzburg which was one of the leading scientific universities in Europe. He specialised in pathology, and his thesis to gain his Doctorate in 1902 was assessed as the best of that year. He then moved to Switzerland where he worked for a number of years as an assistant in pathology at the University of Geneva. In 1905 he returned to Genoa to become a Doctor of Medicine. In this time he became fluent in both French and German. In 1905 he travelled to London where and completed a course at the London School of Tropical Medicine. He then enrolled as a ship's surgeon and undertook voyages to South America, South Africa, and the Black Sea. When he returned to London he was appointed to several pathology positions and he was elected to a Beit Research Fellowship. He published this work in The Lancet.

First World War When the First World War broke out in 1914, Bayon volunteered to serve as a surgeon with the British Red Cross and spent some time as such in France. In 1915 he was naturalised as a British subject and this enabled him to become a pathologist to the County of Middlesex War Hospital in Napsbury, which had 1,000 beds where he spent the remainder of the war. While on his honeymoon in Corsica in 1913 he discovered a species of blind cave insect. Bayon was a founding member of the British Society for the History of Science and was an inaugural member of its council.

Bayon married in 1913 and he was survived by his wife, they had two daughters, Joan Nelia and Cynthia Beatrix, and a son. His half-sister, Constanza (1899–1986), whom he had funded through her degree at Cambridge University, married the eminent physicist Patrick Blackett (1897-1974). His brother Mario Ettore Bayon was a pioneer of football in Italy.

Publications Epithelial Proliferation Induced by the Injection of Gasworks Tar, 1912 Diseases of Poultry: their prevention and treatment, etc, 1933 The authorship of Carlo Ruini's "Anatomia del cavallo", 1935 William Gilbert (1544-1603), Robert Fludd (1574-1637), and William Harvey (1578-1657): As medical exponents of Baconian doctrines, 1938 William Harvey, Physician and Biologist: his Precursors, Opponents and Successors. With plates, including portraits, 1938 Ancient Pregnancy Tests in the Light of Contemporary Knowledge. Extracted from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1939 Miguel Serveto alias Villeneuve (1511-1553), 1939 Paracelsus; Personality, Doctrines and His Alleged Influence in the Reform of Medicine, 1941 The Masonic Order of the Secret Monitor, 1950 The lifework of William Harvey and modern medical progress, 1951 The masters of Salerno and the origins of professional medical practice, 1953 William Harvey (1578-1657): His Application of Biological Experiment, Clinical Observation, and Comparative Anatomy to the Problems of Generation", 1957